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Once upon a time, I was practicing the organ at St. Mark’s on the Campus in Lincoln, Nebraska. Unbeknownst to me, a stranger wandered off the street, and he managed to make his way, silently, up to the organ loft. I was in the middle of a passage that was giving me some problems. I lifted my hands and feet to give the section another try. In that brief moment, the stranger very softly said, “Hello.” I nearly leapt from the organ bench.

I turned to see him standing by some filing cabinets, and after taking a breath to calm down, I said, “Hello.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m surprised you could hear me. I said that very softly.”

“Well,” I replied, “I am a musician. Listening to stuff is kind of what I do.”

I normally enjoy a good conversation with the odd sorts of people that wander into churches. I decided engagement was the best tactic, and began talking to him and walking him downstairs. He began griping about a judge’s order that gave his parents guardianship over him even though he was almost thirty. It did seem a little unfair that he couldn’t make decisions for himself, and I was sympathetic for a moment…and then it happened.

In a passing sentence, he managed to drop in an “I in I” and there was a “Selassie” not far behind. Whenever middle-class white people from the mid-West start dropping Rasta crumbs for me to follow, I am immediately on the hunt to find out where the trail begins. After a few more questions on my part, I got to the core of the thing. It was quite a beautiful little speech in its own way. As it began, a little bit of an affected Jamaican accent was peppered across a few words. By the end, he was speaking with a full on fake accent and interposing lots of “hey mon” between words.

“This is what I’m trying to explain to you about my parents, mon. They don’t understand the I in I. Just because someone likes all of Bob Marley’s music, and begins dressing in a Jamaican style, and speaking in a Jamaican accent, mon, and just because they start calling themselves Bob Marley, mon, and they only reply to people using lyrics from Bob Marley songs…just because they do all that stuff doesn’t mean, mon, that they actually believe that they are Bob Marley.”

“Yes,” I said, “but, you can see how someone might be confused about the difference.”

He could not see that and went away quite disappointed that I didn’t really see how the difference might have mattered.

It was not many verses ago that Luke was telling us about Peter weeping bitterly after his denial. David Bentley Hart rightly points out that this is a big deal for Christian aesthetics. In the classical world, a minor peasant […]

The strangeness of Jesus’ stories is always part of the confrontation. There is this man who plants a vineyard and then goes away. Are we supposed to think this is God? Does God plant Israel and then go away to another land for a long time?

Also, this man doesn’t do things the right way. We all know how to do things. If we send a servant to collect the money and they abuse him, and — for whatever reason — we decide to be patient and send a second servant along and they abuse that one too…well, at that point, we’ve learned our lesson. We don’t send a third. When they abuse the third, how does this man (God?) send his son “that he loves” expecting a different result.

There is the secondary problem of the tenants. Under no system that I know of, when you have a man who is powerful enough to kill you, is there a rule that says, “If you kill a powerful man’s son, you get the rental property where you’re staying.” That’s just weird. It makes their actions especially cruel and seemingly designed to strike despair into the heart of the land owner.

There is always the overwhelming urge to historicize it. He was talking to 1st century Pharisees etc. You can actually read the thing and think of how it affects others without really doing the work that Jesus is asking you to do.

Where is the vineyard that I am protecting for myself?

What crops from my vineyard am I holding back as my own?

Where is the place where I have been patiently asked, too patiently asked — to the point where it doesn’t make sense that so many messengers keep coming — to turn over some of the fruits of my labors?

Where do I actively work to keep Jesus and his messengers away from my work?

It is easy to take Jesus as some sort of clever wordsmith. He’s confronted with an opponent, and he uses his wits to best someone. I want to read it like it’s a youtube clip being shared around on social media of a pundit “owning the dems” or “destroying a conservative.”

This approach conveniently helps me to feel good about myself and to avoid doing the work that Luke is asking me to do.

First of all, we need to get the “mean Jesus” idea out of our heads. I don’t suggest that he wasn’t human and didn’t get angry or frustrated and all that. I’m just suggesting here that we begin form the place that Jesus is always moving and speaking in love. The point of this confrontation is not some kind of “gotcha.” Jesus is saying the most loving thing he can say to the Pharisees, and if I am going to do the work that Luke is asking me to do, I have to dig out those parts of myself.

I have to find those places in our culture and in my life where God is moving and I’m not acknowledging it. I have to find the places where I am afraid to talk about the movement of God because it would mean fessing up to the fact that I “didn’t know the time of visitation.” I have to find the places where I am maintaining a convenient balance between not fully living in to the Baptizers call for justice and not saying that it’s wrong.

The trick is to find the Pharisaical parts of myself which is always the part the — and this is important — places the distance of correct theology between me and the motion of God in the world.

A person encounters two people expressing an offensive opinion. She talks to them and finds them willing to engage. As the discussion proceeds, one of the two begins shifting his opinion. The other doesn’t. She decides to stop engaging the one that is not budging and set up a coffee with the one that is changing.

A) The coffee meeting results in a new friend and a change of heart. The one eschewed remains entrenched in his opinion.

B) The coffee meeting results in more discussion but no real change of position. The one eschewed is so taken aback by being put out, that he reconsiders his opinion, and changes his mind.

C) Two people that agree on a park bench are excluding a passerby. The passerby changes one of their minds resulting in those two on the park bench the following week excluding the one that hadn’t changed his mind.

Imprecatory psalms are always difficult, and I think they have to stay that way. If they ever get easy, you’re probably doing it wrong. As I’m reading an imprecatory psalm, I can’t help but letting my mind drift to people […]

I wonder if the language of self-love and self-acceptance is the right kind of language to wrap around the problem of personal psychological development. Without question, there is something right about it. There is a place where you have to […]

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“The right side of history” is an odd phrase to me. It’s been cropping up on my feeds lately, and it always makes me quizzical. I try to imagine what it will be like one hundred years after I’m dead, […]

I haven’t really read Berdyaev since my 20s. I think that David Bently Hart says somewhere that your 20s is the correct age to stop reading him, however, I heard Kalistos Ware mention him in a lecture, and it brought […]